New Missions manager Rich Dauer, 60, was a former star infielder for the Orioles from 1976-85 and helped the Orioles win the 1983 World Series. Dauer's approach to managing is simple. “We'll come in organized,” he said. “Players see that right away. You can't have any seconds where they don't know what they're doing.”

PEORIA, Ariz. — Rich Dauer arrived in Asheville, N.C., in 1974 as the Baltimore Orioles' first-round selection. Fresh from USC, where he had spearheaded two national-championship runs, the shaggy-haired, mustachioed infielder carried with him the breezy cool of the California surfer he was.

“He grabbed me around the neck, threw me against the wall and said, 'I don't care if you're the No. 1 pick, I don't care what kind of bonus you got, when you play you give me 110 percent and we'll work out fine,'” Dauer said.

“You know what? I believe that to this day,” he added. “How can I preach to play this game 110 percent if I don't do it?”

In a matter of weeks, Dauer, now largely bald and sans moustache, will be offering up those sermons as the new manager of the San Antonio Missions. Two months after being let go as third-base coach of the Colorado Rockies, a casualty in the purging of manager Jim Tracy and staff, he was hired by the San Diego Padres to oversee their Double-A club.

“I'm 60, but there's nobody out there who's going to outwork me,” Dauer said at the Padres' spring-training camp outside Phoenix. “I can't run to first base anymore like I used to. I'm not going to slide. But I definitely will do anything that everybody else does, because I enjoy the game and I'm thankful to have the opportunity to stay in it.”

Managing this year, he feels, is a particular blessing.

After a remarkable 10-year playing career with Baltimore that included a .985 career fielding percentage, World Series crown and Orioles Hall of Fame induction, he hasn't landed a managerial job since overseeing the independent-league San Bernardino Spirit near his hometown of Colton, Calif., in 1987. In the wake of retiring as a player in 1985, Dauer has spent a dozen of the ensuing years as a third-base coach, including the past four in Colorado.

“He's been pretty much managing the whole time next to a major-league manager,” Padres general manager Randy Smith said. “The only thing is he just hasn't been the one filling out the lineup cards.”

Indeed, since arriving as a ballyhooed farmhand in 1974, Dauer has never been without a job in pro baseball. Along the way, he has established a reputation for chameleon-like adaptation and dogged perseverance.

“Just his body of work, with tons of experience and the variety of roles he's had,” Smith said. “You get all that, plus you get his great disposition and demeanor.”

Upon reaching the major leagues for his first full season in 1977, the anointed second baseman for the Orioles to replace the departed Bobby Grich, Dauer was only months removed from earning International League co-MVP honors after hitting .336 for the Rochester (Minn.) Red Wings.

In the big leagues, though, Dauer lost his hitting stroke. He scuffled with only one hit in his first 41 at-bats, going hitless in April. Manager Earl Weaver, one of the game's prominent tacticians, passed along his own tough message.

“Earl called me in and basically told me, 'You better find something to do to help this club or you won't be here for long,'” Dauer said. “He was always great to me. I know he liked me because I wasn't hitting and I was still there.”

Learning from shortstop Mark Belanger, another light-hitting, superb-fielding player, Dauer underwent a remarkable transformation as a player. In 1978, he set American League marks with 86 consecutive errorless games and 425 straight chances without a miscue.

Along the way, Dauer became a Baltimore icon, reaching the World Series twice and watching how pros such as Cal Ripken Jr., Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray and Weaver went about their business.

“I've been in this game long enough, and things happen, but the game of baseball hasn't changed for me,” Dauer said. “You still hit the ball, you still throw it to first, but it's the people that make it.”

People such as Ripken Sr., the legendary patriarch of one of baseball's noted families. The elder Ripken died in 1999.

When the manager body-slammed his young player, “It didn't take me very long, all of maybe 10 seconds, to realize that my whole life and attitude toward the game of baseball had changed,” Dauer said.

“I would never want to play this game scared. Especially at the big-league level, if you don't want to be the best you can be at what you're doing, you're really failing the people you're working for and the people you're working to get better.”